Original title: Tumour hypoxia in clinical oncology: imaging, therapeutic strategies, and translational challenges
Xuehua Lin, Maitiú Ó Murchú, Luke Sheridan, Soumya Menon +3 · September 2026
Solid tumours often suffer from hypoxia, which means they have very low oxygen levels. This happens because cancer cells multiply rapidly and build faulty blood vessels that cannot deliver enough blood. Without oxygen, tumours become more dangerous. They grow faster, spread, hide from the immune system, and resist treatment. Consequently, hypoxic tumours lead to worse patient outcomes. For three decades, scientists have tried to tackle this problem. Some test treatments that boost oxygen delivery, others use drugs that activate only in oxygen-starved tissue, and some try to cut how much oxygen tumours consume. However, clinics still lack widely adopted ways to identify hypoxic tumours, and hypoxia-targeted therapies remain rarely used in regular clinical care.
Imagine you are baking a cake, but your oven has hot and cold spots. You cannot tell which parts are undercooked until you cut into it. Even though you know the problem exists, you have no reliable way to measure the hot spots while baking. In this paper, the oven's uneven temperature is like tumour hypoxia, and the lack of a good thermometer is why doctors cannot yet adjust cancer treatment based on oxygen levels.
Cancer patients with solid tumours often have low-oxygen regions that resist treatment, but doctors have no standard way to detect or target them. This review explains why progress has stalled and what therapies are waiting to be tested. Understanding these barriers could eventually lead to more effective, personalised cancer care.
The abstract doesn't say. As a review, it does not present new experimental data or a validated clinical protocol. It summarises ongoing challenges and pending treatments, but does not itself resolve the barriers to clinical adoption.
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Tumour hypoxia in clinical oncology: imaging, therapeutic strategies, and translational challenges — Xuehua Lin, Maitiú Ó Murchú, Luke Sheridan et al. — Clinical and translational radiation oncology — doi:10.1016/j.ctro.2026.101279
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.